


The One with the Victor

by isquinnabel



Category: Friends (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe, Alternate Universe - Hunger Games Setting, Angst, Canon-Typical Violence, Character Death, Family Feels, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-04-08
Updated: 2015-04-08
Packaged: 2018-03-21 21:33:09
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,606
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3705389
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/isquinnabel/pseuds/isquinnabel
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>There are no winners; there are only survivors. [Hunger Games AU]</p>
            </blockquote>





	The One with the Victor

**Author's Note:**

> I made the D: face a lot while writing this.
> 
> Obviously, since this is a Hunger Games setting, major character deaths abound, as does canon-typical violence (er, Hunger Games typical, not Friends typical). Fairly warned be ye, says I.
> 
> Major thanks to Ozqueen for the beta <3

 

**6\. Monica Geller, District Three**

It’s not the first time that two children from the same family have gone to the Games. It is, however, the first time that two children from the same family have gone to the same arena. 

Monica and Ross stand side-by-side on District Three’s stage, with matching soot-black hair and their best clothes cut from the same piece of discarded cloth. The cameras can’t see it, but there are subtle differences in the quality of their reaping outfits. The buttons at the nape of Monica’s neck are discolored, while the ones on her older brother’s shirt have been painstakingly wiped clean; Monica’s hemline has multiple loose stitches, having been hurriedly mended hours earlier, but all of Ross’s shirt seams are neat and straight. Even so, when she watches the reaping footage on the train that afternoon, she’s satisfied with how she looks. She comes across as cold. Determined. She looks like somebody who isn’t about to go down without a fight.

Neither Monica nor Ross could live with being responsible for the other’s murder, so they agree to keep their distance from each other in the arena. They also stay apart during training: while Ross focuses on the outdoor survival and camouflage stations, Monica discovers that she is a natural with spears and hunting knives. She has good reflexes. She manages to improve her skills dramatically while maintaining a scared-little-girl façade in front of her competition, and isn’t that the only way for someone like her to survive the Games? She may be tiny, but the other tributes (except Ross) have no idea how strong she is. (Her mother will never forgive her if she survives, because that would mean her brother is dead.) (She closes her eyes. _Shut. Up._ )

On the morning of the Games, she stuffs a note in Ross’s left shoe: _I’m sorry about the cockroaches_. Once, when they were kids, Monica had been angry with Ross and snuck a handful of live cockroaches down his shirt. He’d freaked the hell out which, at the time, was satisfying and hilarious. Now, she can’t quite shake little stabs of regret; he’d never fully shaken his resulting fear of cockroaches.

He slips his reply to her during breakfast: _It’s okay. I probably deserved it._

By the time she steps into her glass cylinder, Monica has forcibly locked down the pieces of herself that still feel a steadily mounting panic. _I’m fast_ , she reassures herself, slowly rising into the arena. _I’m strong_. She bites her bottom lip. _I can kill if I have to_. The countdown screen ticks away the seconds and her hands shake (from adrenaline, she tells herself) as she surveys the scene: grass, trees, sky. Cornucopia. Supplies are scattered around the ground, as usual. ( _Where’s Ross?_ ) ( _Don’t. You can’t help him._ ) She fixes her gaze on a promising-looking backpack and, when the gong sounds, dives headfirst into the fray.

She’s quick on her feet; the first tribute to reach the supplies. Her strategy is to arm herself immediately with something simple and fight her way out before finding water and shelter – if she aims for the higher quality weapons further in, she’ll have deadlier tributes to face on her way out. Monica may be strong, but she’s not stupid; if she can avoid a fight with the vicious tributes from Career districts, she will. She scrambles to get the bag on one shoulder and its accompanying knife in her hand, but it’s nine seconds into the Games and screams are already ripping through the air. 

When she turns to run, her route is blocked. There are tributes everywhere, bloodstains peppering the ground. _(Where’s Ross?) (STOP!)_ Knife out, she charges at a boy she remembers fumbling uselessly with weapons at the Training Centre, but he drops his shoulder and her stomach slams hard into his elbow. Winded, she loses a few moments as she falls to her knees but that’s all it takes; he yanks the bag off her shoulder and runs for the tree line. She still has her knife, but what good is that when the Careers have got to the arrows and throwing spears? Someone else’s blood is splattered all over her, so she lets herself fall to the ground and pretends to be a corpse, knife strategically hidden beneath her body.

She’s making plans behind her deliberately blank eyes, but less than a minute passes before something heavy slams hard into the side of her head and everything is gone.

 

**5\. Chandler Bing, District Nine**

Chandler remembers nothing about his reaping. 

He stares out the window of a high-speed luxury train, sitting on a ludicrously comfortable chair, in front a feast that’s probably more than his entire food intake over the past year, and he can’t remember how he got there. Obviously, he knows he’s on his way to the Hunger Games, but at some point today he must have stood with the crowd of boys in front of the Justice Building. He must have heard his name called out. He must have said goodbye to his parents, and been escorted to the train. But he doesn’t remember a single thing. For all he knows, the footage he’s been shown of District Nine’s reaping is an elaborate ruse to get rid of him. 

Once he gets to the Capitol, Chandler keeps himself to himself. He doesn’t even talk to his district partner; he’s only ever met her in passing, and he didn’t even know her name before the reaping. He works in the refineries, while she works in the fields. They live in different sectors. They don’t even have school on the same days. He doesn’t know this girl from a hole in the ground, and he’s not about to start getting attached to her now.

He tries to get some basic weaponry skills under his belt at the Training Centre, but he’s not very good. He keeps his head down and doesn’t make eye contact with anybody, which is partly due to his instinctive Don’t Trust Anyone plan, but also because he can’t bear to see the disdain that he knows will be in everyone else’s eyes. _What a weakling_ , the other tributes must be thinking. _Easy prey_. 

(The worst part, he thinks, is that they’re right. He’s a weakling. He’s easy prey. He doesn’t want to die, but he’s realistic. He doesn’t expect to live.)

The one exception to all this comes when a broad-shouldered kid from one of the outdoorsy districts (Ten? Seven?) spends about an hour with him. He shows him how to use the strength in his legs and shoulders, and how to use his elbows to defend himself from an attacker. Chandler mumbles a quick thanks and slips away (he can’t shake the thoughts of _what the hell is this guy doing?_ and _what does he want from me?_ ), but once he’s in the arena this advice ends up saving his life. He makes a snap decision to run to the edge of the Cornucopia so he can grab something, _anything_ , when a girl with a knife rushes towards him. Instinctively, he dodges her knife and elbows her stomach as hard as he can. When she falters, coughing, he snatches away the backpack on her shoulder and runs for his life.

After running through the woods for what feels like hours, he stumbles across some water. It’s a tiny pool – about two feet across, and maybe six inches deep – but it’s something. He sinks to his knees and leans over the puddle, scooping handfuls of lukewarm water into his mouth.

He did it. He survived the bloodbath.

It’s too early to start celebrating, but he lets himself indulge in a moment of relief. He honestly thought that he’d be lying dead on the ground with a machete in his gut by now, but he isn’t. He’s alive. Not only that, he’s alive with supplies. Supplies that he stole from someone who tried to kill him. Chandler starts to feel the faintest echo of something vaguely like hope – maybe, just maybe, he’s not as incompetent as he thinks he is. Maybe he has an outside chance of getting out of here alive.

Maybe he _can_ win this thing after all.

He nearly jumps out of his skin when the cannons begin to fire. He stops drinking and counts the blasts: five… six… seven. Seven deaths. An unusually slow start. 

He’s leaning forward for another few mouthfuls of water when two strong hands grab him from behind. Before Chandler knows what’s going on, he’s being pushed face-first into the pool. It happens so quickly that by the time he gasps in shock, he’s already under – he inhales a lungful of water and thrashes hard against his attacker, trying desperately to cough, to breathe… 

His movements weaken, and his legs go slack. The person holding him down doesn’t loosen their grip until the eighth cannon blast of the day echoes throughout the arena.

 

**4\. Ross Geller, District Three**

Ross has lived his entire life at the hapless mercy of someone else’s whims, and never has the sting of this been more potent than on the day he’s reaped into the Games with his little sister.

When his mother hugs him goodbye in District Three’s Justice Building, she clings tightly to the fabric of his shirt as she whispers “ _please come home… please, please come home_ ” in his ear. When it’s his father’s turn, he grips Ross hard by the shoulder and stares directly into his eyes. “You look out for your sister. You hear me?”

He promises his mother that he’ll try; he also meets his father’s gaze and nods. What else can he do? There is no such thing as a best-case scenario here, because every possible outcome is unbearable. On the train, while Monica stares wide-eyed at the repeat broadcast of today’s reapings, he realizes that there is only one thing left that’s in their control.

“I’m not going to kill you.”  
Monica turns and stares at him.  
“What?”  
“I don’t want to kill you, so I’m not going to. Do you want to kill me?”  
“Of course not.”

Caesar Flickerman’s hair is green this year. A bright, lurid green that reminds Ross of the plastic coating on the wire quotas he filled yesterday (was it really only yesterday?).

“Mom and Dad are going to go through hell, no matter what happens in the arena. Either one of us dies in there, or both of us do.”  
Monica says nothing. He’s not saying anything she doesn’t already know.  
“The only thing worse than both of us dying in there would be if I killed you, or if you killed me. That’s all we’ve got left, Mon. All can do is promise not to kill each other.”  
Monica nods. “I’m good with that.”  
“And I think… um, maybe it would be for the best… probably the best thing we can…”  
“Spit it out!”  
He sighs. “We can’t be responsible for each other either. At all. Like, we can’t team up, or even try to find each other when we’re in there. The longer we’re together, the higher the chances that we’ll hurt each other. Even if we don’t want to.”  
Monica murmurs her assent, and Ross pretends not to notice that she’s blinking back tears.

They solemnly promise not to look for each other in the arena about two minutes before the train enters the tunnel to the Capitol. ( _I’m sorry, Dad_ , he thinks. _But if anyone can look after themselves in that place, it’s Monica._ )

Once they’re in the Training Centre, Ross sticks to the outdoor survival stations. He’s spent his life amongst overheated factories and dirty concrete, and he hasn’t got the faintest idea how to survive in the wild. Sure, the arena may not turn out to be wilderness, but it probably will. Ross learns about edible plants, types of trees, basic camouflaging skills and how to find water. On the morning of the Games, he’s petrified but at least he feels vaguely prepared for what’s in front of him. 

When the countdown ends and the gong sounds, Ross doesn’t even attempt to face the Cornucopia. He whips around on his platform and runs as fast as he can in the opposite direction. He runs and he runs and he runs, only stopping when he’s completely certain that there’s a comfortable distance between himself and the bloodbath. He’s lucky enough to stumble across a hollow tree, so he sets up camp in it as best he can, gnawing on some leaves and berries that look safe enough. He’ll look for more food in the morning; the first order of business is surviving the night.

Ross honestly thought that Monica had a shot at winning. At the very least, he assumed that she’d outlive him. So, when the sun sets and the anthem plays, he isn’t expecting to see his sister’s face in the sky. But there she is, the very first portrait. She’s dead. His little sister is dead. There was nothing he could have done to prevent it, but that doesn’t stop guilt and regret from flooding every last bit of his body. He curls up in his tree trunk and lets himself sob. (His mentor groans. Capitol citizens will interpret this as whiny and weak – now who’ll agree to sponsor him?)

He makes too much noise. Ross doesn’t know it, but today has yielded the lowest ever Cornucopia death toll and the Careers are angry. They’re hungry to prove themselves with a successful overnight hunt, and eager to show off their strength and ruthlessness to the world. 

The best that can be said about Ross’s death is that it’s over fast.

 

**3\. Joey Tribbiani, District Seven**

Joey has exactly two strengths. They are: hauling lumber, and making friends.

These aren’t useless skills. As the train hurtles towards the Capitol, he feels sick to his stomach but he doesn’t feel hopeless. He’s broad-shouldered and strong, and he knows how to get people to like him. He’s got a real shot at this. 

(Plus, if he does die, perhaps making as many friends as possible during training means that whoever kills him won’t be sadistic about it. Sure, he’d rather not die at all – but he still could. At the end of the day, he just doesn’t want it to hurt too badly.) (Mary Therese’s arena had been a grungy cityscape. A cruel, bloodthirsty pair from District Two had her cornered in an alley, and her death was drawn out for hours. The thought of experiencing what she did makes him feel faint and panicky, and so does the thought of putting his family through that all over again. It can’t happen. It can’t.) 

At the Training Centre, he tries as best as he can to forget that they’re all about to kill each other. He becomes everyone’s buddy: he flirts with the Career girls from One, Two and Four; he shows the guy from Nine some basic defensive manoeuvers; and he demonstrates to a nervous-looking kid from Twelve the best way to hold an axe. He even spends an entire morning with a weepy girl from Eight; he teaches her how to climb, and she takes him to the knot-tying station. She teaches him about the durability and usefulness of various types of fabric, and Joey thanks her with a smile and a wink before moving onto the archery station.

The flaw in this plan doesn’t become evident until the Games are underway.

When the bloodbath is over, the Career pack splits on gender lines. He finds himself invited into the girls’ alliance, which is fine with him. He knows he’ll have to prove himself useful to keep them from killing him right away, but he has no problem doing that. This arena is largely woods – his comfort zone. He guides them among the trees like a pro, lugging the heaviest of their supplies as easily as if they were made out of air. He even finds them a cave. The perfect shelter.

“Best not to stay here long-term, though,” muses Four. “I can’t see any obvious seam, but I bet this’ll be a launching point for mutts later.”  
“Yeah, I guess,” agrees One, but she looks sceptical.  
They carefully set up their camp and eat one strip of dried beef each. Joey supplements their meal with a decent supply of leaves, nuts, and berries, but all three girls turn them down. Yeah, it kinda sucks that they don’t trust him enough to eat his food, but, well… more for him!

The Career girls, it turns out, are businesslike and detached in their kills. Joey considers this vastly better than if they were vicious and gleeful, like the male half of the Career pack, but there’s still something deeply unsettling about it. The type of person who’s nice to everyone during training is always going to be the odd one out in an alliance like this one, and this is his undoing. He can’t completely conceal his distress when Two kills the tiny twelve-year-old from Eleven with an arrow through his heart. Even worse, the next day they find the girl from Eight hiding under an overhang and it falls to him to break her neck. 

After the cannon fires for the girl from Eight, they hike back to their cave. Joey can’t stop thinking about her: he doesn’t know her name – he intentionally didn’t learn _anybody_ ’s name – but he still feels awful. He hates himself for being the one who took her life away. As long as he lives, he will never, ever forget the feeling of her bones snapping in his hands.

He’s mid-thought, despising himself, when two pairs of hands suddenly pull him to the ground. He yells in pain as his head hits a tree root, and Two and Four use their combined weight to hold him down. He struggles, but these girls are highly trained and extremely strong. One crouches over him, a foot on each side of his body, holding her knife to his throat.

“Sorry, Seven,” she says. “It’s nothing personal.”

It only takes Joey half a minute to die, but every second hurts.

 

**2\. Phoebe Buffay, District Five**

Phoebe already spends every moment of every day fighting to stay alive. The streets of District Five are scattered with those who have nowhere to go, and nobody to care for them. Some make short-lived allegiances with each other, but life in the dirty alleyways between the power plants will always boil down to two main rules: put yourself first, and watch your own back. She even kicked a ten-year-old in the stomach one freezing winter night to get his sleeping spot by the warm wall of a generator. The Hunger Games are nothing. She’s already living them.

No-one comes to the Justice Building to say goodbye to her, not even Ursula, but even that is a kind of advantage. She’s always been a little jealous of people who love and are loved back (in the same abstract way that she’s jealous of fairy tale characters with wings and magic wands), but it suddenly becomes a good thing. It must be torture knowing that someone you love is worrying about you, and praying desperately that you’ll come home safe. Her district partner has tears streaming down his face for the entire train ride, muttering something about his mother and sister, but Phoebe is fine. Why should she worry? She has nothing to lose, and everything to gain.

Killing, however, turns out to be a little harder on her than she anticipates. She immediately runs away from the bloodbath, but she follows a scared-looking boy who somehow got away with a backpack full of supplies. He stops for a drink at a tiny waterhole, and she sneaks up on him while cannon fire for the Cornucopia victims mask any noise her footfalls make (she’s used to dusty concrete and cinderblock, not rustling leaves and snapping twigs). As he leans in for another mouthful, she bounds forward and slams his face into the water. She holds him under until his struggles stop and the cannon blast confirms that he’s dead.

 _I’m sorry_ , she thinks. _I'm really sorry_. She hates the feeling of a life slipping away under her hands, of the fight slowly ebbing out of him. This boy is dead and it’s one hundred percent her fault… but what else can she do?

That first kill breaks the ice. Despite how difficult it was, she now knows with absolute certainty that she is capable of killing.

She doesn’t shy away from taking risks. She spies on the boy Careers, and sneaks into their camp. She doesn’t steal anything, but carefully rearranges some choice weapons to make it look like the boy from Four is working against his teammates. After the resulting fight, the boys from One and Four are both dead. Days later, as soon as she’s confident in her tree-climbing ability, she lures a pair of allies into her domain (the girls from Twelve and Six) and tricks them into cornering her up a tree. Twelve hacks away at the trunk with an axe, but she clearly doesn’t quite know what she’s doing. Phoebe carefully shifts her weight to ensure the trunk falls directly on top of Twelve, steals the axe, and makes quick work of Six. 

As the field thins out, she becomes a Capitol favorite and she starts receiving hot meals every night. _I could get used to this_ , she thinks, ripping off a piece of crusty bread roll and dipping it into a bowl of thick pumpkin soup. She has never in her life been so well fed. She wonders vaguely what they’re saying about her in the broadcasts; she has no family for them to interview, unless you count Ursula, and she goes largely unnoticed by almost everyone in her district. She worked the abandoned-and-unwanted angle in her interviews, which didn’t seem to work too well at the time… but maybe things are turning around.

In the end, it comes down to Phoebe and the girl from District One. As the final battle progresses, it transpires that they are extremely well matched. Phoebe is alert and strong after eating so well, and she’s absolutely willing to be vicious and take risks. The girl from One has a completely different fighting style, but she’s just as gutsy and has years of training behind her. The battle lasts for hours and hours, and includes an interlude in which they both fight off a swarm of screeching, feline mutts.

Phoebe is missing an eye, her left arm, and part of her small intestine when she finally gives up; she’s lost far too much blood, she can barely see, and she can no longer wield any kind of weapon. Before the arena fades to nothing, her last conscious thought is spent wondering why she bothered.

Why did she fight so hard to stay in a world that never wanted her in the first place?

 

**1\. Rachel Green, District One**

Rachel has been underestimated her entire life.

After the reaping ceremonies go to air, she figures that the majority of Panem probably sees her as a real contender: she’s from a district with a strong reputation for producing ruthless victors; she’s pretty, and will easily be able to get the Capitol crowds to like her; and she’s lean and well-fed, with noticeable muscle tone from years of training. She may not have the ox-like build of some of her district’s previous victors, but everyone knows that being some giant powerhouse is no guarantee of a win (though some Careers are cocky, and are inclined to completely forget this).

Her own district, however, looks at her with a substantial amount of scepticism. When the procedures for selecting from the sizeable pool of volunteers are finished, she can see some raised eyebrows in the crowd. _Really?_ they’re thinking. _We’re sending her?_ The pampered daughter of a beloved victor, who’s spent her entire life enjoying the luxury of the Victor’s Village without earning it, is not who they would have chosen to represent them. She hasn’t even made a name for herself at training, unlike several of her classmates. The majority of District One sees her as under-prepared at best, or utterly useless at worst. Even Daddy doesn’t think she can do it! He keeps on giving her elementary combat advice, as though she hasn’t spent years of her life preparing for the Games.

When it begins, Rachel enters the arena with something to prove. She arms herself immediately with a knife, a spiked mace and a throwing spear, and proceeds to do just that.

She can make tough decisions. The boy from Seven is charming and pleasant, and in another life she could see herself being friends with him. But this is the Hunger Games. He’s becoming a liability. When the time comes to kill him, she slits his throat without hesitation. She’s also clever and strategic. Splitting from the male Careers is her idea (grandstanding idiots, all three of them), and it proves to be a good one. The boys from One and Four die on the morning of Day 5, which is surprisingly early. She figures that they turned on each other way too soon, which is exactly why she didn’t want to be allied with them in the first place.

Those deaths create a political minefield among the remaining Careers, and yet she manages to stay alive. Rachel never once initiates a fight, but when they happen (and they inevitably do), she can hold her own. She emerges as the final living member of the two Career packs, but not without substantial injuries. She holes herself up in the cave for a few days – Four’s earlier insistence that it would be a launching point for mutts was bull (she just wanted the cave for herself once the alliance broke), and she relies on the goodwill of sponsors to keep infection at bay. The citizens of the Capitol clearly like her enough to spend substantial amounts of cash on keeping her alive; she figures that she must have played everything just right during the pre-game.

The final battle between herself and the girl from Five is as bloody and horrific as Panem expects, but Rachel successfully manages to keep her gag reflex at bay (though she nearly vomits after stabbing Five in the eye – disgusting). She doesn’t get any sadistic pleasure from killing this girl, but she well and truly crosses over into a survive-at-all-costs mindset and she doesn’t hesitate to rip her apart as best she can. The only way to survive now is to kill, and Rachel can’t die – she can’t! She’s _so damn close_!

When the final canon sounds and the fanfare begins, Rachel collapses. She has her own near-fatal wounds that need tending to, and a full week passes before she’s capable of attending the closing ceremonies. 

She did it, though. She won.

She doesn’t exactly relish reliving her multiple kills. While onstage at the ceremony, she watches footage of herself bludgeoning the girl from Three at the Cornucopia and feels vaguely ill – she doesn’t even remember doing that. Still, she can return home with her head held high; to her own house in the Victor’s Village, one that she earned herself. Never again will District One underestimate Rachel Karen Green.

(Daddy comes into her dressing room after the ceremony, fear behind his eyes. “President Snow wants to meet with you,” he says. “In his private quarters.”)


End file.
